Installation

Download Thematic

Installing Thematic

Creating a Child Theme

To create your child theme, go into the thematic directory, copy the thematicsamplechildtheme folder, and paste it in the wp-content/themes directory. You should see it appear immediately next to the thematic folder in your themes directory. The first thing you may want to do is change the folder name from thematicsamplechildtheme to something a bit more descriptive.

Next, enter the folder and open up the style.css file in your text editor. You’ll see this at the very top:

This header section is read by WordPress and gives it some basic information about the theme. The first thing you can do in here is to change the Theme Name from “A Thematic Child Theme” to someone a bit more descriptive.
Once you’ve saved your file, you can go to Dashboard | Appearance | Themes to find and activate your child theme.

Going back to your style.css file, a little way below the header section, you’ll see the imports. This is where your child theme inherits all the styling from Thematic. Here is a sampling:

The reset.css resets the browser styling so that you can start with a known set of defaults regardless of the browser your site visitors will use. The typography.css file creates the basic typography styling for your site. The 2c-r-fixed.css creates a two-column site format that has the sidebar on the right. To see some other layout options, visit the following folder (in the thematic parent directory): /thematic/library/layouts.

You’ll see that there is a “2c-l-fixed.css” file. Unsurprisingly, this will create a two-column site format that has the sidebar on the left. Open up the other layout files to learn what else is available right out of the box. If you find something that you may like but you’re thinking of tweaking it a bit, STOP! Remember, the first rule of child themes is that you’ll only make edits in your child theme, NOT in anything you find in the thematic directory. Whatever you wish to change, copy that rule from the original Thematic file, paste it into your child theme style.css, and make your edits in there.

This is the documentation for the Thematic Theme. At the moment it is very bare bones but will grow with time. It ‘s community editable so if you have an account and feel you can contribute, please help us expand the docs.